Want Higher Test Scores? Plant More Trees!
By Samantha Grimes, August 8, 2023
Students around the country, and around the world, who live in large cities all find themselves with a lack of greenspace.
As an educator who has worked in multiple urban settings, I am surrounded by concrete, brick, and steel boxes throughout the day. The view from my current classroom is a solar-panel covered parking lot (woohoo!), a few newly-constructed luxury apartment buildings, and an enormous yellow crane signifying the next step in the gentrification of our neighborhood. Sure we have a football field and a few young trees lining the parkway, but do my students have natural areas large enough to provide any type of escapism during their day? Not at all, but this is not an exceptional story. Students around the country, and around the world, who live in large cities all find themselves with a lack of greenspace. Besides missing out on our natural world, the quality of their educational experience is also hindered. Researchers have been looking into this phenomenon for decades, and have found some obvious and not-so-obvious connections between student wellbeing and exposure to the environment.
4 Ways More Greenspace Near Schools Improves Educational Quality
Higher Test Scores: As a side-effect of improved mental health and healthier interpersonal relationships, students also saw positive impacts on their memory, attention spans and self-discipline, all leading to increased performances on standardized tests. Researcher Rodney Matsuoka also notes, “consistent and systematically positive relationships between nature exposure and student performance”.
Better Mental and Physical Health: Bullying rates drop and stress decreases with access to time spent in nature, reasoned to be due to a stronger community bond built on additional social interactions. A collection of studies have also uncovered a trend of increased physical activity of various degrees after providing increased greenspaces for play directly around schools.
Decreased Extracurricular Crime: Although there is some debate about whether it is eliminated or just transferred, those who have access to community and school-based green spaces in America’s 300 largest cities are at a lower risk of crime in those areas.
Increased Feelings of Safety: Students and teachers in historically-disenfranchised communities surveyed before and after the restoration of greenspaces near their schools reported higher ratings for perceived safety and reduced gang activity for up to two and a half years after the projects were completed.
Change The Chamber is a bipartisan coalition of over 100 student groups, including undergraduates, graduate students and recent graduates.